Validating the ingestion configuration

After you create and populate your staging tables and write your ingestion mappings, the final part of the process is to run the command to validate your work.

About this task

When you instruct the Information Store to ingest the data that you loaded into the staging tables, you do it one ingestion mapping (and one staging table) at a time. The i2 Analyze deployment toolkit and the ETL toolkit both have a command for validating the structure of your staging tables and a particular ingestion mapping in a particular mapping file.

The data within the staging tables is not validated against the i2 Analyze schema or allowed value ranges. For more information about the value ranges, see Information Store property value ranges.

Procedure

The procedure for instructing the Information Store to ingest your data is similar to many others in this process. You start with one type or one staging table, and build from there.

Choose an entity staging table that you populated with data and provided with an ingestion mapping.
Run the ingestInformationStoreRecords command in VALIDATE mode.
For example:
```
setup -t ingestInformationStoreRecords -p importMappingsFile=mapping.xml 
      -p importMappingId=Person -p importMode=VALIDATE
```
When you specify importMode and set it to VALIDATE, the command checks the validity of the specified mapping, but no ingestion takes place. For more information about the running the command and any arguments, see The ingestInformationStoreRecords task.
The output to the console indicates whether the mapping you identified is valid, provides guidance when it is not valid, and gives a full list of column mappings. The command sends the same information to a log file that you can find at toolkit\configuration\logs\importer\i2_Importer.log.
Complete this validation step for each staging table and ingestion mapping that you plan to use.
The ingestion process for links verifies that the entities at each end of the link are already ingested. If it fails to find them, the process fails. When you are developing your ingestion process, ingest a small amount of entity data before you validate your links.

What to do next

Correct any problems in the ingestion mappings file (or any ingestion properties file that you specified) before you proceed to Adding data to the Information Store.